Working at Mozilla, passionate about the Open Web

On Brendan's Success

This Open Web thing? Brendan Eich spent the last 20 years helping to create, then save, then grow it. It might still exist in some meaningful form without him. It might not.

Brendan has stated his motivation for this work over and over again: to enable free speech. I’m sure he likes it better when that speech agrees with his own opinions. I know that he sees not just the freedom of speech but, more to the point, ways to efficiently disseminate all speech as transcending his personal opinions on almost all topics.

He succeeded fantastically well: the web is more open and better at facilitating speech than any other medium in the history of mankind. It is, as the EFF put it “one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments”.

Without this accomplishment, it’s highly unlikely that Twitter would exist – the communications platform that enables the quick formation of movements for a cause in a way that puts everything before it to shame.